voices, for
there is trouble in the air.

Among the knots of keen-eyed English there is one small party which
seems to be as joyous as a lot of school-boys. Five men are playing at
bowls, and one of them is stout, and well knit, and swarthy visaged
with long exposure to the elements. He is laughing uproariously, when
a lean fellow comes running from the very edge of those beetling
cliffs which jut far out into the gray, green Atlantic.

"Hark'ee, Captain Drake!" he cries. "Ships are in the offing, and many
of them too! It must be the fleet of Philip of Spain come to ravage
our beauteous country!"

"Ah, indeed," answers the staunch-figured captain, without looking up.
"Then let me have one last shot, I pray thee, before I go to meet
them."

And so saying, he calmly tosses another ball upon the greensward,
knocks aside the wooden pins, then smiling, turns and strides towards
the waterside.

Thus Drake--the lion-hearted--goes out to battle with the great Armada
of Philip of Spain, with a smile upon his lips, and full confidence in
his ability to defeat the Spaniards at home as well as on the Spanish
Main. Let us see how he fared?

Smarting with keen anger at Drake and his successful attacks upon his
western possessions, Philip--the powerful monarch of Spain--determined
to gather a great fleet together and to invade England with a mighty
army.

"That rascally pirate has beaten me at Cadiz, at Cartagena, and at
Lisbon," the irate king had roared, with no show of composure. "Now I
will sail against him and crush this buccaneer, so that he and his
kind can never rise again."

A mighty fleet of heavy ships--the Armada--was not ready to sail until
July, 1588, and the months before this had been well spent by the
English in preparation for defense, for they knew of the full
intention of their southern enemy. Shipwrights worked day and night.
The clamoring dockyards hummed with excitement, while Good Queen Bess
and her Ministers of State wrote defiant letters to the missives from
the Spanish crown. The cold blood of the English--always quite
lukewarm in their misty, moisty isle--had begun to boil with vigor.
The Britons would fight valiantly.

As the lumbering galleons neared the English coast, a heavy mist which
hid them, blew away, and the men of England saw the glimmering water
fairly black with the wooden vultures of old Spain. The Spaniards had
come ready to fight in the way in which they had won many a brilliant